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Latin American Studies: All Disciplines
A guide to select databases, library resources, links, and tips for researchers to find, access, and manage quality information sources in all disciplines of Latin American Studies.
There are a plethora of resources on the web to find digitized printedbooks, manuscripts, newspapers, images, archival documents, music, film, and video with Latin American & Caribbean content.
This section includes key portals and databases and allows you to browse resources by topic, format and media, and country and region.
This site provides links to open access digitized collections of primary sources for Latin American and Caribbean history. Searchable by country, format, and genre.
A gateway to digitized books, manuscripts, images, musical scores, newspapers, magazines, and sound recordings from the national libraries of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Spain, and Uruguay. Allows you to search all the libraries' collections at once and then links you out to that library's webpage.
Full-text books, pamphlets, serials and other works about the Americas. The collection is rich in original accounts of discovery and exploration, pioneering and westward expansion, the U.S. Civil War and other military actions, Native Americans, slavery and abolition, and religious history.
ArchiveGrid includes over 7 million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,400 archival institutions represented, ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual number is estimated to have been as high as 12.5 million. The database and the separate estimates interface offer researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.
hosted at Vanderbilt University, the SSDA is dedicated to identifying, cataloging, and digitally preserving endangered archival materials documenting the history of Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic World. Its largest and oldest collections were generated by the Catholic Church; the baptismal records preserved in Slave Societies are the oldest and most uniform serial data available for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World and offer the most extensive information regarding their ethnic origins.
A cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute has three major digital projects--Dominican Music in the United States, First Blacks in the Americas, and Dominican Veterans in World War II--and other online resources.
Explore over 8,000 Documents of 20th and 21st-century art in Latin America, the Caribbean, and among US Latino communities from the archive of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Aims to preserve for researchers the personal and official websites belonging to notable contemporary Latin American and Caribbean artists, artists’ collectives, artists’ groups, galleries, museums, and related entities in order to assure the continuing availability of the important content they contain.
Housed at the University of Miami, the Pan American World Airways digital collection features annual reports, brochures, directories, periodicals, and timetables from 1929 to 1991.
Multimedia collection that covers every region of the world and features the work of many of the most influential documentary filmmakers of the 20th century, including interviews, previously unreleased raw footage, field notes, study guides, and more.
Searchable database of independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University. The DNSA collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Includes a lot of documentation of U.S. interventions in Latin America, especially during the Cold War.
Browse Latin American collections on relations between the United States and Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru.
Digitized documents from the Historical Overseas Archive of Portugal, which is dedicated to the history of Portuguese maritime colonization, exploration, trade, and travel.
Portal to all the digitized archives of the Spanish State, including those pertaining to the governance of Latin America & the Caribbean in the age of Spanish Empire.
Digitized holdings of the Royal Academy of History of Spain. The academy's archives include codices, manuscripts, and printed books spanning the Middle Ages to the present day pertaining to the history of Spain and Spanish America.
Section of LANIC portal that contains a list, ordered by country, of links to the top level archived version of all ministry and presidency Web sites captured as part of the LAGDA project.
This site features a searchable database of the hieroglyphic texts, iconography, and calendrics along with a translation and analysis of each of the four extant codices (screenfold books) painted by Maya scribes before the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century.
This directory of open access resources contains more than 8000 links to digitized works: diccionarios, gramáticas, libros de historia de la lengua, de ortografía, ortología, prosodia, métrica, diálogos, etc.
Listen to audio recordings of prominent Hispanic writers including Nobel Laureates Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz, and renowned writers Jorge Amado, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar reading from their works at the Library of Congress.
Literary documentation of hundreds of French-speaking authors from the islands and their diaspora with photos, biographies, bibliographies, interviews, and extracts of texts.
This major academic portal provides access to thousands of full-text literary works of historic and contemporary Spanish and Latin American authors as well as providing critical background and analysis.
Digitized cultural magazines from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela from 1880 and 1930 in the collections of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin.
O Acervo de Literatura Popular em Versos da Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, o maior da América Latina, atualmente com mais de 9.000 folhetos de cordel foi formado a partir da década de 1960 e, dessa iniciativa resultou uma extensa bibliografia, composta de catálogos, antologias e estudos especializados.
Contain details of plays written in Spanish in different periods and countries, as well as information about their authors, sample translations into English, synopses, performance histories and many other tools for interpreting the featured drama.
Digital collection of Latin American travel accounts from the 16th-19th centuries in Brown University's Special Collections. Includes browse-by-country function, essays, and bibliography.
From the everyday to the extraordinary, these rare diaries and the supporting correspondence describe the travel experiences, destinations and desires of nineteenth and twentieth century American women.
The project has wide ranging interdisciplinary appeal, offering first hand accounts of major historical events as reported by eye witnesses, detailing key interests and themes in women’s lives, providing snapshots of cities, cultures and customs, and charting the rise of modern tourism and the travel industry. Topics covered include: Emigration and daily life, Missionary Work, World War I, World War II, Boxer War in China, Frontier Life in America, Personal Enlightenment through travel, Education and Finishing School, Sightseeing, Holidays and Tourism, Customs, culture and leisure.
From the everyday to the extraordinary, these rare diaries and the supporting correspondence describe the travel experiences, destinations and desires of nineteenth and twentieth century American women.
The project has wide ranging interdisciplinary appeal, offering first hand accounts of major historical events as reported by eye witnesses, detailing key interests and themes in women’s lives, providing snapshots of cities, cultures and customs, and charting the rise of modern tourism and the travel industry. Topics covered include: Emigration and daily life, Missionary Work, World War I, World War II, Boxer War in China, Frontier Life in America, Personal Enlightenment through travel, Education and Finishing School, Sightseeing, Holidays and Tourism, Customs, culture and leisure.
Online bibliography that points scholars to resources for the study of sports and recreational activities across the continent--a clearinghouse to identify primary historical sources relating to sport, recreation, and physical education, their location, and scope.
Digitizations of magazines and periodicals representing key moments in the development of cultural journalism in Argentina, accompanied by indices and brief critical essays and articles.
Digitized holdings of the National Library of Argentina. Searchable by keywords and collections: books, incunables, journals and magazines, manuscripts, photographs, maps, sheet music, archives, audio, video, and publications of the library.
The Presidential Messages database is a collection of digital full text presidential messages of Argentina and Mexico from the early 19th century to the present. There are plans to add the presidential messages of other countries in the future.
Digital humanities project of interviews realized in the 1990's by Dr. Rita Arditti, an Argentinean college professor living in the United States, with members of the Association of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina.
Records released by the United States National Security Council in 2016 relating to human rights abuses committed in Argentina between January 1, 1975, and December 31, 1984.
The National Archive of Brazil has databases for the following collections, many digitized: Sistema de Informações do Arquivo Nacional, Acervo Judiciário, Entrada de Estrangeiros no Brasil, Família Ferrez, Memórias Reveladas, Movimentação de Portugueses no Brasil (1808 - 1842), História da Holanda e Holandeses no Brasil, Ofício de Notas da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, Processos do Supremo Tribunal Federal, do Supremo Tribunal da Justiça e da Casa da Suplicação, Biblioteca Maria Beatriz Nascimento, and SECOM (Serviço de Comunicações, 1940-1959).
This collection, originally edited by the Companhia Editora Nacional from 1931 to 1993, includes 415 books treating Brazil by Brazilian and foreign authors in fields of History, Sociology, Anthropology and Natural History, among others.
Digital collection of executive branch serial documents issued by Brazil’s national government between 1821 and 1993, including presidential reports and messages, the Almanak of the Brazilian Royal Court, and ministerial reports. Project carried out by the Center for Research Libraries' Latin American Materials Project (LAMP).
Open access portal sponsored by the Brazilian government geared at promoting access to Brazilian literary, artistic, and academic works, as well as music and audio.
Manoel de Oliveira Lima (1867-1928) was a Brazilian diplomat, journalist, historian and book collector whose career spanned Brazil's transition from empire to republic. Brazilian history and literature was the central focus of his writing and collecting. This database's monographs collection offers access to approximately 3,800 publications from the mid-16th through the early 20th century. The roughly 4,000 pamphlets in the collection date from the 19th to the early 20th century and are on Brazilian subjects or by Brazilian authors.
Documents, images, videos, plays, articles, and poetry connected to Abdias Nascimento (1914-2011), an Afro-Brazilian artist, scholar, and politician. He founded the Black Experimental Theater in 1944 and later became the first Afro-Brazilian elected to the Senate in Brazil.
O Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo - APESP - disponibiliza em seu Repositório Digital documentos, álbuns, fotografias, periódicos, livros, jornais, revistas, mapas, entre outros.
Editada originalmente pela Companhia Editora Nacional no período de 1931 a 1993, a Coleção Brasiliana reúne 415 títulos ( 439 volumes) de autores brasileiros e estrangeiros. O Projeto Brasiliana Eletrônica digitalizou todo o acervo da Coleção e o exibe de forma aberta neste website.
Project developed in the 1980’s by the World Council of Churches and the Archdiocese of São Paulo with three main objectives: to prevent legal documents regarding political crimes from being destroyed at the end of the military dictatorship; to obtain and disseminate information about practices of torture under the dictatorship; and to promote education on human rights.
Materials, such as personal letters and religious and commercial records, related to the 19th century German "Mucker" community of southern Brazil. Also included are military records of the war that led to the community's purge in 1874, and a bound manuscript containing theological and everyday reflections of the German-born Georg Klein, who immigrated to southern Brazil in 1853.
A cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
Digital facsimiles of objects held at the University of the West Indies St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad, including posters, ephemera, photographs, manuscripts, and more.
Partnered with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (DLOC) and housed in Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks (NULabTMN), the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) is a highly interactive digital scholars lab for the collaborative research and study of pre-C20 Caribbean literature.
Literary documentation of hundreds of French-speaking authors from the islands and their diaspora with photos, biographies, bibliographies, interviews, and extracts of texts.
The National Library of Chile has digitized more than 165,000 objects in its collections, in addition to "Memoria Chilena," a project consisting of 770-plus works on Chilean history and culture.
Digitized texts, manuscripts, photographs, iconography, objects, videos, and audio recordings aimed at giving visibility to the human rights violations committed under the Pinochet Dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990).
Cantos Cautivos is an archive of music sung and heard in political detention and torture centres in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The memory of these experiences is an important fragment of the lives of those who resisted, fought and shared their stories for this project.
The National Library of Colombia has searchable digital collections including the following thematic areas: authors, Bogotá, musical documentation, audiovisual holdings, photographs, historical photographs of Cartagena de Indias, graphic holdings, newspapers, pre-modern and modern books, the Ministry of Culture, Historical Archive of Medellín, and Instituto Caro y Cuervo.
A site dedicated to the life and work of José Antonio Aponte, a free man of color, carpenter, artist, and alleged leader of a massive antislavery conspiracy and rebellion in colonial Cuba in 1811-1812. In this website, you can read an annotated version of the trial record of Aponte’s descriptions of the “book of paintings" and visit the image gallery to investigate the visual culture of turn of the nineteenth-century Havana.
This collection, compiled from Cuban sources, spans the period from Cuban independence to the end of the Batista regime. The collection sheds light on Cuban feminism, women in politics, literature by Cuban women and the legal status of Cuban women. 1898-1958. Stoner Collection.
The International Digital Ephemera Project is an initiative to digitize, preserve and provide broad public access to print, images, multimedia, and social networking resources produced worldwide. Currently includes several Cuban collections.
Collaboration between the University of Florida and Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José Martí (BNJM) that includes digital collections of archives and manuscripts, monographs, ephemera, maps, law, periodicals, theses and dissertations, Judaica, thinkers & intellectual leaders, and U.S. Government Publications about Cuba.
The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute has three major digital projects--Dominican Music in the United States, First Blacks in the Americas, and Dominican Veterans in World War II--and other online resources.
The discovery of the National Police Historical Archive in 2005 opened an extensive and timely resource for the study of Guatemalan history and human rights in the region. This site currently includes over 10 million scanned images of documents from the National Police Historical Archive.
La Biblioteca Digital Mexicana, BDMx, es una plataforma digital multi-institucional: El Archivo General de la Nación, La Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), el Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CEHM- Carso, y el Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.
Covers Mexican Cinema, from its beginnings in the late 1890s to its “Golden Age” (1930s to 1960). Includes popular movie periodicals, film flyers, and scrapbooks. Access reviews, movie stills, programs, and advertisements.
The Presidential Messages database is a collection of digital full text presidential messages of Argentina and Mexico from the early 19th century to the present. There are plans to add the presidential messages of other countries in the future.
La colección Escritos de Mujeres siglos XVI al XVIII tiene como propósito poner a disposición del público lector, en cuidadas ediciones, las obras que escribieron las mujeres de aquella época.
This database of government reports of Mexican haciendas from 1822 to 1910 is one of the most important qualitative and quantitative sources of information about the public administration of Mexico in the 19th century.
This site features a searchable translation and analysis of four codices (screenfold books) painted by Maya scribes before the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. The codices contain information about Maya beliefs and rituals, as well as everyday activities, all framed within an astronomical and calendrical context.
Mesolore is a bilingual resource for scholars and students of Mesoamerica (Nahua & Ñudzavui). It Includes 3 interactive 16th-century indigenous documents from Central Mexico and 3 from Oaxaca, plus archives of alphabetic documents from the 1520s to the 1960s, introductory tutorials on indigenous writing and culture in Central Mexico and Oaxaca, an interactive Atlas of Mesoamerica, and video and audio commentaries by Scholars on Mesoamerica’s past and present.
Glass plate negatives, photographs, and lantern slides of the Mexican Revolution taken by photographer Sabino Osuna. Includes images of Francisco Madero, Victoriano Huerta, Alvaro Obregón, Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa, as well as street warfare during La Decena Trágica. Digitized by the UC Riverside Libraries.
Ticha allows users to access and explore many interlinked layers of texts from a corpus of Colonial Valley Zapotec manuscripts and printed books, including images of the original documents, transcriptions, translations, and linguistic analysis, including morphological interlinearization.
Project of the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica (IHNCA). The mission of Memoria Centroamericana is to make available the most important Central American historical, literary, visual and audio documents in digital form to the general public.
"Ama y No Olvida: Museo de la Memoria contra la Impunidad" se construyó con el objetivo principal de contribuir a dignificar a las víctimas del Estado de Nicaragua a partir de abril 2018 y honrar su memoria.
La Biblioteca Digital Panameña es una colección básica de obras en formato digital representativas de la vida y la cultura del país. Es parte del proyecto Biblioteca Virtual Iberoamericana y Caribeña El Dorado, coordinado por la UNESCO. Los textos completos de las obras recopiladas están disponibles a través de este sitio en Internet y en CD-ROM para consultas locales en la Sala Panameña de la Biblioteca Nacional.
Digital facsimile of Guaman Poma de Ayala’s autograph manuscript of “El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno,” a highly unique 17th-century manuscript. The "Corónica" is one of the few full-length books produced by an Indian in colonial Spanish America, and is particularly noteworthy for its biting critiques of the Spanish colonial administration and elaborate illustrations. The website includes annotated transcriptions alongside the images of the illustrated manuscript.
A place where researchers, academics, teachers, students, genealogists, filmmakers, and the community at large find primary (historical documents) and secondary sources about the history and culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora.
The United States annexed Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898 and has since governed the island as an unincorporated territory. Since 1898, Congress has debated upwards of 100 bills and enacted 11 laws extending four distinct types of citizenship to Puerto Rico. This website provides a documentary history of the federal citizenship legislation for Puerto Rico.
The Delis Negrón digital archive captures the life and legacy of the Puerto Rican writer born in 1901, who was also director, editor, poet, writer, English professor and activist throughout his residency in south Texas and Mexico City during the twentieth century.
Palante (1970 - 1976) was a bilingual newspaper published by the Young Lords Party in New York City. Palante focused on the Puerto Rican independence movement, the oppression of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in the United States, and global struggles for liberation.
This major academic portal provides access to thousands of full-text literary works of historic and contemporary Spanish and Latin American authors as well as providing critical background and analysis.
The Biblioteca Digital Híspanica is the Digital Library of the National Library of Spain. It features books, manuscripts (theatrical/literary), drawings, photographs, engravings, cartographic materials, music scores, sound recordings, newspapers, and magazines from Spain & Latin America.
Contains over 567 digitized magazines and journals published in Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Cuba, the Philippines, France, Italy, Morocco, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela in the 19th and 20th centuries.
A foundational listing of all books published in Spain, Portugal and the New World or printed elsewhere in Spanish or Portuguese during the Golden Age, 1472-1700, including a suite of digital search tools to permit its investigation.
Digitized holdings of the Royal Academy of History of Spain. The academy's archives include codices, manuscripts, and printed books spanning the Middle Ages to the present day pertaining to the history of Spain and Spanish America.
The Royal Library of Spain has currently digitized: Drawings of King Ferdinand VII (1831), Prohibited & Expurgated Books (15th-18th centuries), Incunables, and Medieval Manuscripts.
El Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica conserva una de las mejores colecciones de carteles de la guerra civil existentes en el mundo. Especialmente rica y completa respecto a los producidos por la República, ha sido ampliada posteriormente con la incorporación de otros carteles significativos editados en su día por el bando nacional.
A collaborative project between UNESCO and many important cultural institutions around the world, this library combines prints, photos, film clips, and map images about every UNESCO member on a variety of topics.
A partnership of academic & research institutions offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Note: not all titles are available as full-text.
Princeton's Latin American Ephemera Collection contains thousands of digitized pamphlets, brochures, flyers, posters, placards and other printed items created since around the last quarter of the 20th century by a wide variety of social activists, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, political parties, public policy think tanks, and other types of organizations across Latin America, in order to publicize their views, positions, agendas, policies, events, and activities. The vast majority are rare, hard-to-find primary sources unavailable elsewhere.
Harvard's collections of more than 5,000 scarce and unique 19th century Latin American pamphlets contain political and social commentary. Addressed to fellow citizens, pamphlets document the emergence of the Latin American colonies as independent states and illuminate aspects of their populations' social and cultural life.
This database contains annotated bibliographic citations to a collection of pamphlets, grey literature and ephemera related to political, economic, and social conditions in Latin America during the twentieth century. While the collection spans the period 1910 to 1995, the bulk of the material dates from the volatile Cold War era. With its principal strength in rare contemporary publications such as pamphlets, conference proceedings, political manifestos, speeches, serials, statistical reports, and government documents, this collection give a unique perspective on left and right wing movements in Latin America. Among the most important subjects are human rights, land reform, the labor movement, foreign policy, industrialization, and political parties.
The International Digital Ephemera Project is an initiative to digitize, preserve and provide broad public access to print, images, multimedia, and social networking resources produced worldwide. Currently includes several Cuban collections.
A complete image resource in a wide array of subjects with the breadth and depth to add context beyond the confines of your discipline. All images are from reliable sources and rights-cleared for use in education and research. Personal registration is required to download images. Once registered, you can access core collections remotely. Artstor remote access usually last 120-days but, for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis, this feature is set to 365-days.
"Early Images of Latin America" currently contains 640 digital images from the Latin American Library’s Image Archive documenting people, places, landscapes, urban and rural scenes in various countries of the region from the mid-19th century to c. 1910. Images come from an array of sources, such as promotional albums compiled as travel souvenirs for tourists, studio portraits, personal photographic albums, glass lantern slides and stereoscopic images, as well as images captured by professional and amateur photographers. The current geographic scope of the collection includes Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, and Uruguay, with particular focus on the cities of Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro.
Guide to the varied streaming resources and platforms available to the Tulane community, including Kanopy, Swank, Ethnographic Videos Online, News Video, and More.
This excellent guide to finding Latin American & Spanish film, TV, and video allows you to search by subject and browse by country/region. Created by Jesús Alonso-Regalado, Librarian for Latin American/Hispanic Studies at SUNY-Albany.
Covers Mexican Cinema, from its beginnings in the late 1890s to its “Golden Age” (1930s to 1960). Includes popular movie periodicals, film flyers, and scrapbooks. Access reviews, movie stills, programs, and advertisements.
Sounds of all regions from every continent to include genres such as reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz, and other genres such as traditional music - Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku, and more.
The world's largest online classical music library. Offers the catalogs of more than 50 classical, jazz and world music labels with more labels joining every month. Includes leading independent classical labels such as BIS, Chandos, CPO, Haenssler, Hungaroton, Marco Polo, Vanguard Classics, VOX, and of course Naxos. World music content is provided by ARC, Celestial Harmonies and others.
This collection includes a historical introduction describing the creation of electroacoustic music in Latin America; a selection of 558 compositions created using electroacoustic media by Latin American composers between 1957 and 2007, available for listening online; Biographies and interviews with composers; graphic material including scores and pictures; and finding aids for 390 composers and 1723 compositions.
